Comics Alternative

For the month of May, Shea and Derek discuss two books that, at first glance, seem quite different, but whose similarities become more apparent upon closer examination. They begin with Masahiko Matsumoto's Cigarette Girl (Top Shelf Productions), a collection of eleven short comics originally published between 1972 and 1974. This is one of the few books by Matsumoto available in English -- another translation, The Man Next Door, was published by Breakdown Press in 2014 -- and the guys strongly advocate for more attention on this mangaka. Shea and Derek recall their earlier discussion of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life, where the figure of Matsumoto is central to Tatsumi's autobiographical narrative. The stories in Cigarette Girl demonstrate the artist's style storytelling, which he referred to as "komaga" (or "panel pictures" in English), with its emphasis on a cinema-influenced panel breakdown and a more adult subject matter. Along with this, all of the stories end ambiguously or "obscurely," without any